1. Field
The present invention relates to cryptography, and more particularly to the enhancement of security in encryption and key generation by extending noise-based physical encryption techniques. The invention also relates to optical communications.
2. Related Art
Two of the main topics of cryptography are encryption and key generation. Encryption aims to maintain the secrecy of a message and usually requires a short secret to be shared between the two communicating parties. Key generation is a method of generating (or expanding) that short secret. There are many traditional cryptographic methods of attaining these objectives, including the Advanced Encryption Standard for encryption and the Diffie-Hellman (DH) algorithm for key expansion/generation [reference 1]. Such algorithms make it difficult for an attacker to read the secret message or discover the shared secret key used between the transmitter and receiver. However, it is difficult to quantify how hard it is for an eavesdropper to attack these systems. As such, it is always useful to be able to make any cryptographic method more secure.